The niche and paratextual industries of games and play

Game Rules and 2nd Playtest

Game rules are an essential component to any board game. Or any game in general. Game rules establish the goal and objectives of a game, as well as explaining to new players how the mechanics of the game work. The rules also act as obstacles for the players and establish the parameters of what the players can and can’t do within the world of the game.

With this in mind, I took the time, this week, to primarily tweak and produce a concrete set of rules for the second play-test, which I mentioned in my last post. Those tweaks turned out to be incredibly useful, as some of the positive feedback from the second play-testgenerally stated that the rules made sense and were effectively written. Having said that though, the play-test did reveal that the game rules can still be improved.

The second play-test, conducted in class, was also massively important in that it solidified my idea of not revealing the killer during the game. One of the play-testers made an interesting connection between Slasher and ‘Mafia’, and said that by having players not know who the killer is, the game would be more challenging and tense. Other feedback from the play-test included designing a larger game board, as the current iteration is too small, particularly the squares. The image below demonstrates how the tokens barely fit into the squares, therefore demonstrating the need for a larger board.

The idea of using a timer, in each choice round, was one of my favourite things to have come out of the play-tests’ so far. Much like my primary influence Until Dawn, the use of a timer, especially an analogue one, would be massively effective in getting players to make instinctive choices, rather than the right one, and therefore would add another fascinating and challenging element to the game.